


Letter One: This Fatal Poetry

by StarkAstarte



Series: Mind Palace Notes: The Great Hiatus [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Drug Use, Grief/Mourning, Love Letters, M/M, Post Reichenbach, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-21
Updated: 2013-06-21
Packaged: 2017-12-15 16:30:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/851637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarkAstarte/pseuds/StarkAstarte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock imagines writing letters home to Baker St. from his Mind Palace. If he writes them down, he might forget to burn them. It's a Many-Patch Problem he [dis]solves at the end of a syringe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Letter One: This Fatal Poetry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OwnThyself](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OwnThyself/gifts).



_John._  

_If I burn the letters, I won’t be tempted to send them._

_If I don’t write them down, I won’t be tempted not to burn them._

_Simple. Elegant. These solutions to Seven-Patch Problems concerning the constant effort to curb my own justifications for contacting you. It’s getting worse than that, to be truthful. A bit beyond a Seven-Patch Problem and closer to a Seven-Percent Solution. Though cocaine is a vulgar narcotic. It lacks refinement, in more ways than one. I hope you know I would never touch the vile concoction. I prefer a purer substance, white as stardust. Ah, you see, I am growing fanciful. Quite soon, I suspect, I will be oozing poetry like plasma from my various unseeable [and therefore unsealable] wounds. This has nothing to do with Science, John. Scientific inquiry has been quite suspended._

_I suspect you are entertaining fantastic notions concerning my Fall, you clever idiot. I must insist that you resist all attempts at wrapping your endearing little brain around any notion that liberates me from my grave. If you were standing here before me, taking my pulse, insisting that I am not dead, John--you would be quite, quite wrong. Fatally mistaken. No one has ever been less alive than I am in this precise moment. I lack all my former wit and vivacity. I lack the mad spring in my step that Mrs. Hudson will insist on referring to as my ‘cantilevering about’. Do, do buy that exasperating woman a dictionary for her birthday, John. Make up flashcards if you must. Draw her a diagram of which I would be proud, had I any pride left over from what I’ve invested in you._

_For, yes. I am proud of you. Proud to have been your friend. To have earned your esteem and high regard. No single achievement in my life has made my death more regrettable. No mystery has ever baffled me more than the Case of the Ex-Army Doctor Falling Under the Madman’s Spell. It is one I never want to solve. I suspect it would prove the catalyst to the end of all things as we presently know them, and I cannot wish for that, for all that I am beyond caring for things of any kind, save a sharp syringe, a likely vein, and a soft surface upon which to be flung down, boneless at last. Stardust singing songs to my brain as I hum along._

_Ah. Here it comes. This fatal poetry will end me in ways far more permanent than a swift appointment with flagstone ever could._

_I remain infuriatingly yours,_

_Sherlock Holmes._

  



End file.
